Try to keep your chin up, folks. With each passing day, England (in particular) becomes more a cautionary tale to those seeking such ideas in the States. Granted, since we have a history of dealing with everything but the huge elephant in the room when it comes to dealing with crime, I suppose that America will whip up some equally ludicrous solution and sell it amongst a bunch of waving flags and the other tough-guy thetoric that allows the GOP (especially) to piss on you while making you feel that it's what John Wayne would have done.

I'm curious about this. It says that CCTV isn't playing a role, but that could be because the cameras aren't being used properly. If they aren't watched right, no they won't prove much. This isn't enough to make me say that CCTV couldn't be a good crime prevention tool.

GAT_00:I'm curious about this. It says that CCTV isn't playing a role, but that could be because the cameras aren't being used properly. If they aren't watched right, no they won't prove much. This isn't enough to make me say that CCTV couldn't be a good crime prevention tool.

I think the philosophy behind them is more like Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon (new window)

Of course, the side effect is that after a time, people realize they're probably not being watched anyway.

GAT_00:I'm curious about this. It says that CCTV isn't playing a role, but that could be because the cameras aren't being used properly. If they aren't watched right, no they won't prove much. This isn't enough to make me say that CCTV couldn't be a good crime prevention tool.

The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years big. This means the London police have solved 100 crimes within the last 100,000 light years. Or about 200 within about the last 198400 years.

Proof that CCTV is in no way sinister. If it doesn't allow surveillance of a given area in sufficient quality to detect crime, it certainly doesn't provide the opportunity to spy on the populace in any meaningful sense.

OK, I'm not entirely serious, but if we could move away from the civil liberties argument and onto the 'it costs a fortune and does bugger all' argument it would be much easier to convince the public that it's a wasted effort.

It's interesting, because as a Londoner I do feel like the cameras (as much as I hate them) give me some sense of security. More as a preventative measure really, because I don't think that I'm going to get mugged in a place which has plenty of CCTV.

This is a toughy when I actually stop to think about it. On the one hand it's simply ridiculous how many cameras are out there watching over us. But then when I get the bus home late at night, I'm really glad there's a camera there. Perhaps it's not just about how many crimes are *solved* but more about how many crimes are *averted*?

We're in a transition phase as a society right now. For all of human history, almost everything we've done has gone unwitnessed and unrecorded. In the fairly near future, every public space will be assumed to have cameras all over it at all time. Video capture is just becoming cheaper and cheaper with better and more useful quality every year. Soon you'll have camera clouds of 50-100 micro-cameras flying around any remotely newsworthy event. Have to keep those 35000 tv channels filled with something.

FTA: He said there are more than a million CCTV cameras in London and the Government has spent £500 million on the crime-fighting equipment.

But he admitted just 1,000 crimes were solved in 2008 using CCTV images as officers fail to make the most of potentially vital evidence.

Ahh, so he takes a number that he possibly does know the value of. (i.e. 1000 crimes solved using CCTV images), then matches it up against another number which he pulls right out of his arse.

First off, the million cameras is crap, the higest official estimate for London was closer to 500,000, and that estimate is generally believed to be utter crap.

The basis comes from a survey of the number of CCTV cameras in two busy south London streets, Putney High Street and Upper Richmond Road.

The researchers sampled 211 "premises" - banks, estate agents, pubs, shops and office blocks - and found that 41 per cent had CCTV systems, with an average of 4.1 cameras per system.

By assuming this is "broadly representative" of CCTV coverage across the whole of London, the authors estimate that 41 per cent, or 102,910, of the 251,000 VAT-registered businesses registered in London would have a CCTV system. Multiply this by 4.1 and there would be 421,931 cameras.

They then add the cameras operating in other public institutions - such as open-street systems, transport, hospitals, schools etc - and reckons it's "not unreasonable to 'guesstimate' that Londoners are monitored by at least 500,000 CCTV cameras".Link (new window)

i.e. they surveyed TWO streets in London, then multiplied the number out to get the total for the whole of London.

<b>rackrent</b> Jeremy Bentham is old news really, its all about defensible space

Foucault's ideas on disciplinary power, did once upon a time push for the idea of Panopticism as a solution, but new research coming out is not really encouraging. There are now as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain - one for every 14 people. A person can be captured on over 300 cameras each day. In the 1990s the Home Office spent 78% of its crime prevention budget on installing CCTV. Yet a study in 2005 concluded that CCTV schemes have little overall effect on crime levels.

the bottom line? the whole point of these cameras are to make you feel safe, not provision of safety. Most people are really much safer than they realize - so don't worry about it ;)

Mr.Niceguy:There are now as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain

Hmm. This figure taken from the Urbaneye study, which derived its 'guesstimate' (their words) from a process rather analogous to standing in the middle of the M1 and deciding that the whole island consists of 4 lane highways.